Agents of Aid: Who Believes Aid Influences Post-conflict States and Why?

• In Event: Aiding and Abetting: The Role of Non-Combatants in Conflict Zones

Abstract

International aid donors have increasingly focused their resources on fragile and conflict-affected countries to help them break out of the cycle of violence and underdevelopment. Scholarship on international aid has largely argued that international aid is used to buy political favor of governments, not respond to the needs of impoverished or conflict-affected populations. Relying on an original survey-embedded experiment administered to over 1,100 experts working for donor and implementing organizations, this paper argues that perceptions of political influence by international donors is conditioned by the age and number of war-torn countries in which the aid expert has worked. Given that influence on the behavior of post-conflict governments is relatively subjective, we find that experts with more experience in these contexts tend to attribute much lower rates of political influence to international donors than those who are just entering the business. These findings suggest that even if donors aim to use aid to buy influence, the aid experts with the most experience see little real evidence of influence on political behavior within the post-conflict country. The responses from the first global survey experiment of donor and implementer country-level staff, shows that these results hold regardless of the recipient country or donor organization.

Authors

• Susanna Campbell, American University

• Gabriele S. Spilker, University of Konstanz